2018 was a big year for KPop, and with a new global record of 5.3 billion Tweets last year, Twitter continues to show that it's a great place to find out what's happening with KPop and to talk about it with KPop fans around the world. The top 20 countries that tweeted the most about KPop in 2018 have been:

Leading global IT and business solutions provider, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced findings from its global study titled, Winning in a Business 4.0™ World, which benchmarks large companies in their Business 4.0 growth and transformation journeys by mapping their adoption of four critical business behaviours: driving mass personalisation, creating exponential value, leveraging ecosystems, and embracing risk.

Jeff Bullas, who has been named by Forbes one of the world's top social marketing talents, has published a helpful article for all those who want to find out how social technologies add value to their daily life.

The Account Based Marketing (ABM) automation provider, Engagio, announced the launch of its Sales Activation Tools, a powerful and scalable set of capabilities that provide customized and relevant real-time account insights to marketing and sales teams.

Prof. Dr. Peter Gentsch, a German management consultant and serial entrepreneur specialized in digital management and data science, is dealing intensively with the topics of personalization and bots in his interesting article "Chatbots for personalized dialogues”, where he pointed out in many places that these topics aren’t actually new.

Fifteen years after being founded in Mark Zuckerberg's college room, Facebook has become a world power with unprecedented opportunities to reach out to its users in a targeted manner - be it advertising or opinion-making.

Hootsuite, the leader in social media management, released in collaboration with We Are Social, the eighth annual report, Digital 2019, which examines digital trends and social media use across 230 countries and territories, uncovered that more than one million new people go online every day, and that 45% of the world— nearly 3.5 billion people annually—are logging in to their favorite social platforms. That’s a near 9% released increase year-over-year despite growing concerns of fake news, fake followers and data privacy in 2018.

Although the death of Snapchat has been predicted many times by now, in fact right after its listing at the stock exchange where is was considered overvalued, the company proves us once again wrong and shows that there is life in the old dog yet.

A recent Qualtrics study of data privacy professionals found that 65% of all organizations use multiple survey tools and 45% of these organizations don't even know how many survey accounts exist within the organization. This fragmentation leads to data silos, security and compliance risks and disjointed customer experiences.

The willingness to share data depends for most consumers on many different aspects: for example, they want to know what type of data they should provide and how they should be stored. The reasons for data disclosure, whether data sharing with third parties takes place, or the possibility of deletion of data at any time is also of interest.

The terms influencer marketing and influencer relations, as well as their opportunities for corporate communication, have been discussed for around ten years now. Essentially, it is about how opinion building works for stakeholders, especially customers or other reference groups, and what levels beyond journalism or advertising are involved.

MediaMath and White Ops, the global leader in bot fraud protection, announced a new partnership that will protect some of the world's largest advertisers, agencies and publishers from sophisticated invalid traffic (SIVT) before it can be purchased. Partnering identity and detection solutions from both companies, MediaMath and White Ops together aim to provide transparency and build trust and accountability in the advertising ecosystem.

The Influencer Performance Marketing startup IROIN entered into a strategic partnership with the AI specialist epicinsights to develop a scoring process designed to check the compatibility of influencers and branded channels in order to arrange campaigns properly beforehand.

High-quality visual product content is widely accepted as an increasingly critical element of an effective e-commerce merchandising strategy. Brands and retailers adapting to a “digital first” world must produce high-quality visual product content at scale to engage with their customers across many channels and platforms. The good news are, that Bright River, a global leader in end-to-end visual product content solutions for e-commerce, just announced its integration partnership with Capture Integration’s ShotFlow, offering more scalability to photo studios serving the e-commerce industry.